JavaScript & jQuery

One particular design trend that has caught my attention of late on web development and graphic design blogs is the fancy gray border that surrounds images in blog posts. There are subtle variations of it around the web, which you can see on a number of blogs and tutorial sites.

Sometimes it’s just an image with a solid border and slightly lighter shaded background. Elsewhere it’s a linked image with the same effect, plus a rollover state that changes the color of the border and/or background. And sometimes it’s seen in the ads on a design blog.

This is the second tutorial in a series explaining how to implement Ajax “from the ground up”, so if you haven’t yet checked out the first tutorial, then please do so now, as this one will be building on code from part one.

In the first part, we learned how to create an instance of the XMLHttpRequest object in a cross-browser fashion. In part 2, we’ll discuss the code needed to start communicating with the server. The result of this tutorial will help us send data to the server.

It started out as an industry “buzzword” and has slowly progressed into one of the most important web technologies in use today. It is easily implemented using your favourite JavaScript framework. It can provide a beautiful layer of enhancement to many web applications, helping to improve page-load times and greatly improve the user experience. It can also degrade the user experience and cause a web application to fail if a particular client-side technology is unavailable.

Yes, I’m talking about the web methodology immortalized by Jesse James Garrett called Ajax. (As Garrett points out, Ajax is not a technology, but several technologies.) This article will begin a multi-part tutorial series in which I will explain how to implement Ajax “from the ground up”. This series will be geared towards web developers who would like to better understand Ajax in its raw format, using pure JavaScript.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a group of collapsible folders using pure JavaScript and some jQuery added to the final product to give it a little bit of flare. The code will be structured in such a way that allows for implementation into a dynamic page — wherein the number of folders may be unknown.

As an alternative to “faux columns” and other not-so-clean methods for attaining equal column height in CSS layouts, this tutorial will explain how to accomplish equal columns with pure, unobtrusive JavaScript. This method takes into account top and bottom border thickness as well as interior padding so that the two columns are exactly the same height in virtually every circumstance. And the script is written to ensure that the columns will equalize regardless of which one is taller, so it’s very practical for dynamic content with complex background styles.